Idle Thumbs 159: Wilson's Ghoulish Countenance

[coaxmetal]

God I feel like a tool, but it's "Bonerdagon". It's meant to be a misspelling of Bonedragon. All the KOL newbs called it "Bonerdragon". 

 

 

I was totally going to correct you on that, too.  I haven't played KoL in years, played it a lot in college though. Even went to KoLcon once since I lived in Tucson at the time.. That was neat. Fun game.

[Bjorn]

God I feel like a tool, but it's "Bonerdagon". It's meant to be a misspelling of Bonedragon. All the KOL newbs called it "Bonerdragon". 

 

 

Bonerdagon is ridiculous.  There has to be legitimate use for Bonerdragon though. 

[Twig]

But Dagon is a fertility god, so Bonerdagon sorta makes sense, huh?

[Bjorn]

I retract all previously claims regarding Bonerdagon being ridiculous.

 

This is probably the most ridiculous conversation I'm going to have today though. 

[Twig]

Dagon is also a wand (aka a phallic object) in Dota 2. The user shoots "magic" (GET IT) at another unit.

 

[Twig]

Also Dagon is some sort of sea deity in Lovecraft's story, "Dagon", and probably has all sorts of tentacles and shit.

 

okay i'm done

[Bjorn]

VIDEO GAMES!

 

 

Dagon from Lovecraft is the only reference to the word that I actually knew. 

[coaxmetal]

I was thinking of Dagoth Ur. I played a lot of Morrowind.

[Merus]

I could never get into KoL because it took a really long time to load everything and the adventure limit was frustrating. It's basically an energy system before all that stuff was formalised.

[Forbin]

This took forever to show up in my podcast app, weird.

 

After listening to the end of this episode I'm really interested in making a "Noah's Ark Defence" game.  Protect the ark from charging animals, let in only two of each type... only two.

[JonCole]

I could never get into KoL because it took a really long time to load everything and the adventure limit was frustrating. It's basically an energy system before all that stuff was formalised.

 

I associate an "energy system" with the F2P system where you pay more to play more. That wasn't really the case with adventures, it was more of an equalizing currency among all players that leveled the playing field to some extent so that the amount of days and/or number of turns to actually complete an ascension actually had meaning.

 

Can't disagree with you about the loading thing.

[Jick]

I could never get into KoL because it took a really long time to load everything and the adventure limit was frustrating. It's basically an energy system before all that stuff was formalised.

 

 

KoL's Adventure system is an energy system from before all that stuff was corrupted.  Multiplayer BBS games from the 80s gave limited turns per day, because they had limited phone line capacity and they didn't want one guy making it so nobody else could play.  KoL is a descendant of that, but instead of being constrained by phone lines we were always constrained by server capacity.  Our servers are much more responsive now than they were years ago.  And as slow as they were back in the day, they would have been even slower if we didn't have any limits on how much time people could spend playing.

 

The energy systems you dislike aren't about resource allocation, they're about monetization.  And ours just isn't.  We have a staunch, absolutely hardline policy of not selling Adventures, specifically to avoid that kind of grossness.  But the game would make no sense as a game without those limits.  It would just be multiplayer Candy Box.  An MMO without any scarcity of resources and without any competition would be pointless.

 

Sorry to jump on the defensive, it just depresses me when shitty gross things that happened years after KoL make people assume that KoL is shitty and gross in the same way.

[Merus]

I understand your defensiveness, but I wasn't clear that when I think of energy systems, I think of KoL first, and then the monetisation that people came up with later make it even worse. Honestly didn't occur to me that everyone else would go 'oh gross, monetisation' as if that's the only problem with energy systems, when what annoys me about them is that they're pretty much always tuned to deny players closure.

In KoL, the adventure limit ticks down mostly uniformly, but making any progress is tied to a random amount of actions, so every day you're likely to be in the middle of something when the game locks you out. It's still 'fun pain', and it's no wonder sleazier developers saw an opportunity to mug their players at that point. More recent (taking into account that KoL is old as balls) games like Animal Crossing also have deliberately paced content, but they try and ensure that you get a little closure, and the stuff that is still open will at least advance with the passage of time. There was a game that the Fallen London guys did called The Night Circus that handled it well - you had a deck of cards, so limited actions, but that game's writing style let them treat each card as an opportunity for a somewhat ambiguous conclusion. (I think The Night Circus handles it better than Fallen London does. Fallen London has an energy system and has the same 'no closure for you' problem, although because of Fallen London's structure and the recent action limit increase, you can usually move forward in a story every play session if you're trying to.)

It doesn't help that the early content in KoL is (presumably) a fair bit simpler and brainless than the later content, so for the first few days it feels like most of what you're doing is grinding on monsters. I did once manage to get to an area where you explored around a temple, and that was fun because every time that came up I had decisions to make.

As I said, KoL is a decade old, and it has a decade worth of content built around that design, and it's kind of shitty to be inducing a discussion about a game's design with the designer when they didn't even ask for it, but it's still frustrating to me because KoL also does some really smart things. It's my go-to example when talking about how gating affects a multiplayer community, with the gating of the chat system behind a simple test of observation and grammar.

[Zeusthecat]

I think a good companion album to this episode would be "Survival" by Bob Marley and the Whalers.

 

[Bjorn]

KoL's Adventure system is an energy system from before all that stuff was corrupted.  Multiplayer BBS games from the 80s gave limited turns per day, because they had limited phone line capacity and they didn't want one guy making it so nobody else could play.  KoL is a descendant of that, but instead of being constrained by phone lines we were always constrained by server capacity.  Our servers are much more responsive now than they were years ago.  And as slow as they were back in the day, they would have been even slower if we didn't have any limits on how much time people could spend playing.

 

That's how I always saw it.  I had a group of friends who played TradeWars for years (all the way into the mid-to-late 2000s), which was my original introduction into a limited turn system.  I actually really liked TW, KoL and games that used those systems pre-gross-monetization, as it allowed me to participate in certain games without having them turn into time sinks, which is kind of the opposite of what modern monetized limited energy systems attempt to create. 

[JonCole]

It's worth noting that you are welcome to stop playing whenever you want, so there is no forced interruption "in the middle of something when the game locks you out". Adventures are capped at 200, so if you find yourself finishing up a quest with 50-something adventures leftover, you can absolutely stop playing for the day if you dread the anxiety of leaving things half-finished. There are also items that allow you to boost your adventures like food and booze, so if you find yourself needing just that little boost to finish a quest you can decide to buy a nice expensive food item in the Market and squeak through.

 

Not only that, but the downtime when you have no adventures is the perfect time to trade and craft items. Back in the day, I'd also mess around in /games chat and play people's trivia games and whatnot to get some decent rewards. I think complaints about adventures contributing to an "energy system" that negatively affects what you can do in the game are fairly unfounded.

 

Most quests in the early game take fairly few adventures to complete. It's not until level 10-ish that quests can take multiple days if you don't know what you're doing.

[Badfinger]

A lot of that has to do with the fact that, as seen above, the people that make KoL give a shit about that sort of thing.

[Merus]

It's worth noting that you are welcome to stop playing whenever you want, so there is no forced interruption "in the middle of something when the game locks you out". 

 

Most quests in the early game take fairly few adventures to complete. 

 

See, here's my problem, right here. If you've got a few adventures, you might as well roll the dice a few times because at least that way you're getting a full day's play instead of forcing yourself to quit early. Advancing in the quest is random, and I think that's what bothers me about the adventure limit.

 

I don't have a problem with the mechanics per se, but how they impact on other design decisions - I wouldn't be having the same problems if, for instance, you had to spend 5 adventures or something and you got a sequence of encounters one after the other, with a quest item extremely likely to turn up as one of those five. Hell, just having a predictably scheduled conclusion is apparently enough for me; generally I can tell how many adventures it'll be before a storyline in Fallen London will advance.

[dibs]

I used to play KoL a lot back in the day. I remember entire adventuring blocks just hitting the same adventure over and over and not getting the drop I needed. I think i remember reading a talk with Jick many years ago where he explained that KoL used to jimmy the RNG in the game to make it more enjoyable? Maybe I was just always just on the wrong grassy gnoll.

I had multiple characters and all and really enjoyed playing it though!

[Ucantalas]

Wow, I remember trying KoL out years ago, played it for a little while and then it just dropped off my radar. I'm a little amazed to see so many things being discussed in a game that I vaguely remember being kind of boring. I had no idea most of the things being talked about were actually in the game!

[syntheticgerbil]

This ending is my favorite ending to a podcast ever. So bizarre and good. I really wish I knew what Remo's facial expression looked like through all those horrible canned sound effects.

 

My only experience with Wisdom Tree was that NES game with different stories, Bible Adventures. As a youngster, I borrowed it from a friend for whatever reason and proceeded to beat it at least three times through, just because it was a game on NES I could actually beat.

[Gormongous]

A new anthropomorphized animal game for Danielle on Kickstarter, The Deer God.

[Wouter]

Do any of you know where to find the post-episode Walking Dead interviews they briefly mentioned?

 

It was mentioned in context of doing an interview with the guys from Transistor about its story now that the game is released. I would also enjoy stories like that a lot! You often see game postmortems years later written without any involvement from the team involved in making the game, it would be great to get them while the game is still in everybody's mind and with some opinions from the creators.